The story of education in lower income neighborhoods is an all too familiar one. The struggle to obtain a stable education is a story of overcoming conditions that are less than favorable, much like the swamp plant. What is causing these students, especially Latinos, to fall behind? How can they grow from these meager and impoverished conditions?

We are a nation of Pakistani halal food trucks, Mexican film directors, Chinese bridal fashion designers, Italian cartoonists, African feminist icons. The term “American” is attached by hyphen to our rich ancestry, an inclusion of the Greek, the Haitian, the Colombian, the Armenian we have sowed within North America’s soil. We are the children of immigrants, or we already are the proverbial immigrants, and our future children will come into this country with a shiny first-generation birth certificate teeming with opportunity we already know they are deserving of.